Teen Queen.(Lady Jane Grey)(Brief biography)

Bookish, bartered, and betrayed: few girls, even in the British Royal Family, were as hounded as Lady Jane Grey. Almost three hundred years after her execution, Charles Dickens, who made a specialty of exploited children, wrote that the English axe "never struck so cruel and so vile a blow." Jane was a cousin of Edward VI, the only son of Henry VIII. As Edward lay dying, he tried to secure the legacy of his father's Reformation by making Jane, an ardent Protestant, queen. She was fifteen. The scheme failed--her reign lasted nine days, the shortest of any British monarch--and she was held in the Tower of London. The icy morning of her death, in February, 1554, Jane watched ...